Infectious, elegant and maybe wrong: an attempt to explain the Long Divergence
1. A low-hanging pomegranate
Over the past, let’s say, twenty years, three different but closely linked literatures have flowered but, as far as I can tell, they have blissfully ignored each other. Namely :
- The Long Divergence literature dedicated to the vexing question of why did the Ottoman Empire not develop at the same pace as Western Europe after the year 1500. Despite close proximity and sustained relationship with fast-growing Europe, the Empire did not match the growth of West and became part of the so-called Rest. This literature is heavily influenced by institutionalist economics. That is the theory arguing that the rules set up by the state or society determine the economic performance of a country. Good rules make for strong growth, bad rules make for a poor showing. And according to institutionalists, the Ottoman Empire had a dismal set of rules which explain its growing retardation relative to Europe (see in particular @timurkuran, @jaredcrubin, but also @nfergus).
- The Empire of Plague literature, (to use a striking expression plucked from Nükhet Varlik’s work), looks at the history of infectious diseases in the Ottoman Empire, chiefly the plague. Historians are confronted with a paradox. While both sides of the Mediterranean had been epidemiologically unified since the appearance of the plague in 1347, Western Europe became plague-free c.1665 but the Ottoman Empire suffered from the “distemper” until late in the 19th century. The Ottoman Empire lived through dozens of major outbreaks after the 1660s and an estimated 1% of the population died of the plague every year, whereas Western Europe seemed to have become pretty much immune from the disease. The plague came to be regarded as both normal in and specific of the Sultan’s realm. It was a fact of life. On this, see Sam White, @yayalon, Alan Mikhail, Birsen Bulmus and Daniel Panzac.
- The Health-and-Growth literature written by macroeconomists, it explores the ties that exist between illness and development. It turns out that healthier societies experience faster growth (duh!) and that, in particular, recurring bouts of infectious diseases that kill or maim a large portion of the population is (really) not good for the economy (re-duh!). This literature is very theory-driven and mostly tries to mesh epidemiological and macroeconomic models. Notably, a segment of this literature has been devoted to the relationship between health and growth in history (see here, here and here).
As far as I can tell, these three strands of literatures have not directly addressed each other . The scholars working on the Long Divergence have not looked seriously at the plague. The Empire-of-Plague research has not explored the structural consequences of the disease. And, finally, the health-and-development literature has completely ignored the Ottoman case.
(Time for a full disclosure: I’m just an amateur toying with the subject, I’m nothing close to a specialist and my knowledge is far from up to speed with the state-of-the-art literature, so there is a non-trivial probability for everything I’ve said so far and for everything that will follow to be complete and utter saçmalık)
2.”Si ce n’est toi…”
In my opinion, this rapid overview of the three literatures shows that confronting them could to be a fruitful exercise.
To put it clearly, I believe that the basic hypothesis that the poor Ottoman economic performance after 1650 may have been in part driven by the epidemiological context should be seriously considered. I’m only going to do a quick-and-dirty overview of the matter here but I hope it may be sufficient to consider it as a question worth exploring further.
When reading about the Ottoman economy, one cannot help but noticing that some of its main characteristics are exactly in line with what one would expect from a system repeatedly shocked by deadly diseases. In particular, several features of the Ottoman economy identified by economic historians as proximate explanations for its underdevelopment relative to Europe after 1600 could have emerged as a consequence of the prevalence of the plague. In particular:
- Exploitative institutions. Corruption was widespread and institutionalized in Europe at the time. But, in the Middle East it is often presented as particularly insupportable and damaging both by locals and foreigners (avanias). This is in line with a region where the very survival of the administrators is rather uncertain (several sultans and princes died of the disease and entire regional administrations could be wiped out in a matter of weeks). Those in charge need to extract a.s.a.p. as much as possible from the taxpayers before either their tax base is wiped out by disease or they themselves suffer from it. In essence, this is the Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson argument applied to a non-colonial (or a not-completely colonial) context.
- Labour shortages. Men seem to have been rare in the Ottoman Empire. Hiring seems to have been a constant issue. Numerous institutions were put in place to attempt to remedy to this situation (corvée, slavery, favouring immigration). Of course, as the plague kills people, so labour-coaxing is consistent with the situation described by the Empire-of-Plague literature. As most of the labour-coaxing institutions tend to have a very negative effect on governance and development this creates a new bridge between plague and growth. Besides, the effects that labour shortages can have on a pre-industrial economy are not trivial (eg making intensification difficult and affecting creation of human capital).
- High interest rates. One of the main insights from the Health-and-Growth literature is that a shortened lifespan and a high uncertainty linked to one’s health can lead to a sharp change in preferences. Economic actors tend to be less patient (ie higher discount rate) which leads in turn to lower saving rates. Pandemics can also increase uncertainty for the lender as the survival of even healthiest of borrowers is unsure. It all fits with the “Turkish rates” described in the European commercial literature of the time. This situation is particularly problematic in a region suffering from labour shortages as the move towards capital-intensive solutions is made that much more difficult.
Other aspects can be put forth, but I believe the point is already sufficiently laboured for now.
3. Trouble shooting: endogeneity
One important counter can be offered to my the-plague-caused-the-Long-Divergence argument. Namely that the prevalence of the disease in the early modern Ottoman Empire is not exogenous. It can be reasonably argued that it was a consequence of the Empire’s policies, in particular, the lack of quarantines. From the 14th century onward, Christian European had put a lot of measures in place destined to limit or prevent the spread of the disease. The Ottoman rarely did so.
This non-response of the Ottoman state to the challenge of the plague, it has been argued, could be caused by endogenous factors: refusal to adopt European fashions, influence of religious fatalism or, simply, lack of funds and of the necessary authority to implement them. If such was the case then the prevalence of the plague in Ottoman lands would only be yet another manifestation of the numerous institutional problems of the Empire, as described by the Long Divergence literature, and it could not be causal.
I don’t pretend that I have a reply to this. At most, I can point to two important conditions that need to be respected for endogeneity to arise. The counter-argument supposes that 1) European policies did indeed have an effect on the geographical spread of the bacillus in Europe and 2) that the Ottoman case was close enough to the European model so that efficient anti-epidemics measures could have been applied efficiently by the sultans.
To this day, the causes explaining the particular prevalence of the plague in Ottoman lands remains an unsolved question. At most, I can point out that both Daniel Panzac and Nükhet Varlik hinted in their work that there may have been plague reservoirs in or around the Ottoman Empire that might have been at the source of the recurring infections. Panzac actually went as far as to share his intuition that the disappearance of the plague in the Middle East was entirely due to natural causes and was not related to the implementation of health measures on the European model by the Ottoman Empire.
Anyway, I like this embryo of an hypothesis as it remains fairly parsimonious and, above all, because it takes us as far away as possible from the culturalist approach which, to me, seems always too close to the Clash-of-Civilizations type of reasoning for comfort. But, as I pointed out, I am no specialist and if someone knows of a paper/book that deals with this or if someone finds a flaw in the reasoning or in the facts please let me know, I’d love to put this train of thought to rest.
Thanks for your attention and take care, don’t you get bitten by them fleas.
[Edit: one important paper came to my attention after writing this, Guido Alfani’s “Plague in Seventeenth-Century Europe and the Decline of Italy”. In it, the author rather convincingly argues that the greater prevalence of the disease in Italy may have had a major and long-term economic impact for the peninsula. This is in line with my own intuition, albeit for another place.]
